News: 1590135313

These countries/nationalities now don't exist in the world according to Redmond!

This move won't go down well amongst the Irish-American community or Dublin for that matter. Perhaps Dubin will think again about the tax status of MS. That would be interesting.

I have to wonder what it really costs to support these languages given the obscene level of profits the MS is generating these days.

What will be next for the chop eh? Hindi? Urdu? Cantonese? British English?

While I sympathise with the plight of Irish, I can (sort of) see the logic of stopping support for a language withe low use levels and for which it must be difficult to find competent translators. Welsh is usually in a much better position but still suffers these things. I not Welsh is not on the list. Does that mean it isn't supported anyway, or it has survived the chop?

As for Urdu, the article specifically mentions it!

M.

"... Irish, I can (sort of) see the logic of stopping support for a language withe low use levels"

I'd like to see you explain that to the people living in the Gaeltacht. Irish law gives equal rights to Gaelic and it is used both in daily life and in the proceedings of the Dail, law courts and in legal instruments. As to the status of Gaelic as opposed to Welsh, they are roughly similar in that they are both protected in law and used by a proportion of the general population and government. Oh, and on the topic of "competent translators" most, if not all, of the speakers of Gaelic or Welsh are bilingual and actually speak English as well! Sometimes better than monolingual English speakers, Trump comes immediately to mind. Covfefe, anyone?

You don't have to live on an island to be insular and MS have just proved this by axing languages that people rely on. Are they going to pay for foreign language classes for those denied the use of their mother tongue?

The last known monoglot (Irish) Gaelic speaker, Seán Ó hEinirí, died in 1998. Only around 20,000 people in the Gaeltacht use it on a daily basis. An interesting ethnofolkloric curiosity, but as a useful language it is effectively dead.

Who are you to judge what level of daily use is useful to a given community?

If the number of red wavy underlines on everything I write, are anything to go by, British English is on a list. It doesn't seem to make a difference how many words I add to the dictionary either.

From experience, Americans abroad are even worse than Brits for thinking that the higher the volume, when shouting English at a foreigner, the closer they are to a Babel fish.

You now that Microsoft/Office 365 doesn't support any English but the colonial one, do you?

Latvian and Lithuanian, but not Estonian...

Putin isn't going to march into Estonia soon.

No, well into May.

Has Microsoft decided that post-pandemic Apple is going to write off all potential non-Anglophones in the respective countries? And how hard are they really to support?

It wasn't very clear to me, but isn't the aim to no longer include bespoke 365 support for these languages, but instead rely on (or push the blame onto) iOS's support (or lack thereof) for them. Can anyone clarify?

A quick check on my iPad says that Irish (Gaelic) and Urdu are available. So this looks like an M$ thing.

No, it sounds like Microsoft has taken an "all or nothing" approach. In future either a language will be fully supported across all the Microsoft Office apps, or the language won't be supported anywhere. These languages were supported by Outlook but not all the rest, and Microsoft decided to drop support rather than translating Word / Excel / Powerpoint / etc into those languages.

I expect that translating Word / Excel / Powerpoint / etc, and keeping those translations up to date, would cost a big chunk of time and money. Microsoft obviously believes that dropping these languages is better for the bottom line than doing those translations.

Changing device level I18n just so that some fanbois can use an M$ maily type app may not go down too well.

Even corporate users might not look too kindly on this.

How many corporate users have Apple kit anyway?

Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati, Urdu and Malayalam are the first languages of about 374 million people in India, about 32% of the population. Is Microsoft aligning itself with Modi's Hindutva nationalism, or happy to be seen that way?

Basque.

I can see that going down well in southern Europe.... It's not like there's a history there of feeling 'left out' and not represented or anything....

I assume that Microsoft have looked at the usage numbers for Outlook 365 in each of these languages and found that the number of users was tiny on iOS, less than the cost of translation and support.

I also assume that they continue to support those languages for Outlook 365 on Windows.

By comparison, many of my favourite freeware/shareware programs invite crowd-sourcers to contribute translations.

LibreOffice have provided the tools to localise the product into unsupported language.

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/LibreOffice_Localization_Guide

I wonder if the new Microsoft could move toward this model of internationalisation/localisation (i18n/l10n).

They should be adding missing languages in the other iOS applications.

"... anyone can speak English if one shouts it loudly and clearly enough..."

In my experience that includes cats and dogs.

“....have until the end of June to switch to a supported language”

That’s ok then. I mean, who can’t fluently learn a new language in a month? Duh!!

Oh, and of course you need to tell everyone you might be writing to to do the same. Otherwise they won’t be able to read your letters.

Fuckwits!!

And in true MS style, “consistency” is taken to mean “lowest common denominator” (because we can’t be arsed to do a decent job of it)